Steve McQueen’s acclaimed film 12 Years A Slave is brutal in its honesty. But is it too much for American audiences?

Rupert Cornwell

Known for his commentary on international relations and US politics, Rupert Cornwell also contributes obituaries and occasionally even a column for the sports pages.
With The Independent since its launch in 1986, he was the paper's first Moscow correspondent - covering the collapse of the Soviet Union – during which time he won two British Press Awards. Previously a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times and Reuters, he has also been a diplomatic correspondent, leader writer and columnist, and has served as Washington bureau editor. In 1983 he published God's Banker, about Roberto Calvi, the Italian banker found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge.

The New York Times, then less than two years into its distinguished existence, was among the first with the news. “We have obtained from Washington,” proclaimed its front page on January 20, 1853, “the subjoined statement of the circumstances attending the seizure and recovery of the negro man SOLOMON NORTHROP [sic], whose case has excited so high a degree of interest.”

It told the amazing tale of Solomon Northup, a free black man
from upstate New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in
1841, and whose ordeal ended only after proof of his free status
was provided to his owner. For some reason, the author of The New York Times story mis-spelled his name throughout.
A few months later, Northup published his memoirs, Twelve Years a Slave. In 1984 came a television movie,
Solomon Northup’s Odyssey. And now the film directed by Steve
McQueen which, according to virtually every US critic, has rendered
this year’s Oscars a foregone conclusion.

Enjoyable is not quite the word for this cinematic experience.
Hollywood has taken the odd stab before at tackling America’s
original sin. But this latest rendition of Northup’s story pulls
not a punch – or more exactly spares not a lash – in its shattering
depiction of the ghastliness of slavery. Never before has the
brutal reality of the economic system that underpinned the
antebellum South been so graphically, at times almost unwatchably,
presented.

Everything about it feels authentic, right down to the language,
the antiquated cadences and biblical rhythms of which are pitch
perfect. Its historical accuracy has been vouched for by none other
than Henry Louis Gates, the leading and occasionally prickly
scholar on black America and its culture, and a consultant for the
film. “It was much like studying… and I didn’t have to make any
corrections,” he has said, calling it “the best film about slavery
ever made from the point of view of a slave”.

Not that there’s been much competition. At most, only a
couple of dozen movies have dealt with slavery, starting with 1915’s
Birth of a Nation which treats blacks (portrayed by white
actors with blacked faces) as ignorant, lecherous and inferior in
every way. Decades later, in 1940, Hattie McDaniel became the first
black American to win an Oscar in the largely stereotypical role of
Mammy, the warm-hearted house servant in Gone with the Wind. In 1975, came the lurid, sex-charged
Mandingo and its sequel, Drum, starring the former heavyweight
boxing champion Ken Norton.

Other entrants include Stephen Spielberg’s fine movie Amistad, the underrated Sankofa, and most recently, of course, Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s bloody action movie
that received generally excellent reviews, but has been likened by
some to a spaghetti western about slavery. By and large though,
Hollywood has steered clear of the topic – other than, of course, Spartacus, separated by an ocean and two millennia from
the great blight on America’s own history.

Arguably, the greatest impact was made by the 1977 mini-series Roots, based on Alex Haley’s novel, which commanded some
of the largest US television audiences of all time. But even Roots – which tackled slavery and its evils in remarkably
forthright terms – has drawn complaints that it presents the issue
as a chapter of the wider immigration story that created the United
States. The paucity of slavery movies is especially striking when
compared with the hundreds made about the Holocaust.

Nor is Hollywood invariably squeamish, anxious not to upset the
audiences on which the industry depends. Look no further than Saving Private Ryan, and the stomach-churning opening
section on the Normandy landings, depicting war in its gory,
unvarnished horror. But then Americans were the good guys – or,
insofar as the Holocaust is concerned, at least not the bad guys.
In 12 Years a Slave, it has been said, it took a non-American
director such as McQueen, and a non-American star (Chiwetel
Ejiofor, who plays Solomon Northup, is of Nigerian ancestry and
grew up in England) to show slavery as it really was.

There may be some truth in this. Nonetheless, you could describe
2013 as America’s Year of the Black Movie. The Butler tells the history of the civil rights movement
as witnessed by a butler at the White House, loosely modelled on
Eugene Allen, a black butler who really did serve through eight
presidential administrations.

Then there was 42, the story of Jackie Robinson, the first player to
break the colour barrier in major league baseball, as well as Django Unchained. This autumn, the six-part documentary, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, presented by
Gates, ran on US public television. And now 12 Years a Slave. So why this plethora now?

One big reason is that the entertainment industry is catching up
with the fact that the US has its first black President. The
election of Barack Obama, the African-American who beat the whites
at their own game, has undoubtedly made admission of guilt easier.
The liberal conscience has been partly assuaged and embarrassing
subjects may be tackled more openly (even though Obama’s heritage
is not of slaves, but as the mixed race son of a Kenyan studying in
Hawaii, about as far from Dixie as it is possible to get in the 50
states).

But the impact of 12 Years a Slave, brilliant movie that it is, should be
kept in perspective. The critic’s embrace and the lavish Oscar
predictions have not yet been matched at the box office. To be
sure, it has been much more than a succès d’estime, but not exactly
a blockbuster. Revenues in the US, where it has been showing since
mid-October, total roughly $39m to date, more than respectable for
a movie which is part-art house, part-general release.

A white landowner overseeing black cotton pickers at work on a plantation in the southern USA, circa 1875 (Getty)

This though is far behind the $95m grossed by 42, and The Butler’s $114m, and represents a mere pittance to the
$300m-plus run up in barely seven weeks by Frozen, Disney’s latest feel-good animated offering. The
exception has been Django, which thanks largely to the Tarantino imprimatur,
grossed $160m-odd at home, and $262m abroad. Every indication is
that 12 Years a Slave will be a big hit abroad, especially if
it scoops the Oscars pool – but not that big.

On the other hand, it’s unfair to use the modest domestic
earnings of McQueen’s film to claim that Americans at large still
refuse to face the facts of their country’s past. Audiences go to
the movies to be entertained, to be transported to another world,
to be amazed. Less often, however, to be chastened, shamed and
mortified. Would the British, one wonders, flock to a film, however
well-made and acted, that unflinchingly depicts cruelties inflicted
in the name of Empire on some unfortunate native people, featuring
the same nauseating assumptions of righteousness and superiority as
in America’s slave-owning South?

12 Years A Slave is the most damning portrait of the old
South imaginable. It is shot in a Louisiana where even mother
nature is not welcoming: skeletal trees, draped in Spanish moss,
that stand guard over oily swamps; the lush but stifling vegetation
of the plantations, the sapping summer heat, rising like smoke from
the cotton fields.

'12 Years a Slave'; director Steve McQueen and Chiwetel Ejiofor talk on set (Rex)

And that’s before you get to Edwin Epps, the plantation owner
into whose hands Solomon Northup – now known by his slave name of
Platt – has the misfortune to fall. Epps regards his slaves as a
subspecies, mere chattels whose only reason for preservation is
their value as labour. He finds justification for his casual
brutality in the scriptures: “And that servant which knew his Lord’s
will and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will,
shall be beaten with many stripes” (Luke 12:47).

However terrific 12 Years a Slave may be, though, its social significance
should not be over-estimated. But is unlikely to be the message
trumpeted by liberal glitterati from the stage of the Kodak Theatre
in Los Angeles, should the film make good on the Oscar
predictions.

Of course, it has much contemporary relevance. Race, you will
not be amazed to hear, is still a problem in the US, albeit a
lesser one. The legacy of the Civil War, fought by the South to
maintain slavery, is still visible. Republicans may have replaced
Democrats as the region’s dominant party. But its conservatism in
some respects is little changed.

Look no further than the staunch opposition to gay rights and
the widespread quest for more stringent rules for elections, a
thinly disguised attempt to turn back the civil rights clock by
suppressing the minority vote, not least of blacks.

And who would deny that the visceral dislike of Obama among some
of today’s Republicans reflects a sense that a black President,
just like an educated, accomplished black such as Solomon Northup
in the 1840s, offends the proper order of things?

But none of this will be changed by a single magnificent film –
even one, to borrow those long-ago words of The New York Times, “whose case has excited so high a
degree of interest”.

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